Hi. It's been a couple of months since I've written, as the end of the year and summer break (here in the southern hemisphere) came around.

Participating in festivals and relaxation time take me back to the informality of shared power and the formality of circles and cycles. I love the chance to be a student again that they provide. I find dynamics shared between all circle processes - from a meal with friends to a wake to a dance - and observing the multiplicity of ways these dynamics manifest strengthens my ability to serve them in any context I'm in.

This week, in Brazil, carnival is offering that once again. Millions of people are in the street, or in parades, jamming on these most ancient principles of collective, meaningful action. Jumping into these circles of celebration invites (or reveals as always present, just below the surface of modern life) community - the experience of mattering to each other, of being held in a web of mutuality.

What is true playfully is none the less so while mourning. This week, with sadness, the murder of a colleague from one of the first favela projects I worked in reminded me how life interrupted serves to unite us around - literally and figuratively - the loved one, and around those things that bond us. We reaffirm what we share, and strengthen the sense of cohesion, of generic humanity - both in mourning what has been lost, celebrating what was given and co-created and unique, and experiencing with heightened awareness what we still have.

In Germany and Poland last week I watched the same thing happening in the informal gatherings and Restorative Circles that unfolded within and around the learning events I participated in. Painful conflict emerged with puffed up chest, or down cast eyes. It seemed to defy the idea that something could be done. It can seem sometimes even to negate the idea of the Circle, because it represents the experience of not mattering. What looks to many of us like a hardening - in resistance, in pain, in fear, in denial, in shock, in anger - is then introduced to a very different experience - a Restorative encounter within a restorative context. And time and again we see - as I did last week - that 'hardness' become a singularly precise cry for understanding, for justice, for connection, for collaboration, for security... It becomes fluid, in the sense that it recognises the others, it wants to adapt to them. It becomes strong (rather than brittle), in the sense that it grounds itself in core values, and won't budge.

In a Semi-simulated Circle I facilitated during the Berlin Facilitator Practice module both the playfulness and the mourning came to the fore. It seems our relationships are too meaningful, our conflicts too serious, to deserve anything less. I often say there are many kinds of silence in the Circle - and imagine that in a future 'restorative culture' each would have their own name. There are also many kinds of laughter, many kinds of tears. The act that has brought us together - the 'crime' that bookmarks the tear in community life - is our call back to a co-existence in which we matter to each other, in which we impact each other, in which our choices are not just about us.

Meeting each other in this way means never being the same again. It means being changed. Just as the act in question changed us, so meeting in the Circle - if we do chose to meet, not simply to sit in the round - creates something new, something unique, that reformulates its own, ancient dynamics. The same ones that seem to bring people together in the widest array of situations, whenever something important to community life is at hand.

Restorative Circles also add a further strangeness - the powerful support and, at times, inconvenient artifice of a new ritual. That is, of a form that we both seek and are not accustomed to. The Author in the Berlin Circle resented and cheered the same facilitator questions within 2 minutes, laughing at, then with, the logic that informed them. Rather like me this weekend, one minute the gringo - disconnected and uncomfortable with the wild folly in the street, the next the carioca - 18 years since I arrived here, happily, intently co-responsible for the flow of carnival misrule.